'Popular anger speaks with a rough voice.' Protesters at March in March, Melbourne. Photograph: GuardianWitness

When Julie Bishop was jostled by protesters at the University of Sydney last week, politicians and journalists at the centre of national politics condemned it in moral terms. There was plain evidence that a lot of the shoving came from the minister’s security detail, but that didn’t prevent Christopher Pyne from describing it as an “assault”. Labor’s Chris Bowen called it a “violent protest” for which there was “no place” in this country. On Twitter, press gallery journalists affirmed that a line had been crossed. The consensus was that the students had departed from legitimate politics.

Violence should no doubt be abhorred, but why is our sharpest disdain always for the violence that comes from the margins? In Australia, and elsewhere, the kind of violence that radiates from the centre of politics seems more fierce and palpable.

On our maritime borders, armed servicemen have repeatedly coerced refugees onto gimcrack lifeboats and pushed them out to sea. On Manus Island, innocent men, women and children are imprisoned behind razor wire, and one man has been murdered. Mostly these events do not draw the same confident moral pronouncements from those who abide in our central institutions.

Instead, this ordinary, deliberate, bipartisan violence is considered in terms of incentives and pull factors. Now and then, someone sighs that it is an unfortunate means to legitimate ends. The difference here is not in the fact or degree of violence. Rather it is that one kind of violence is a matter of procedure and policy, the other is merely an artefact of popular anger.

That is to say, the violence on Manus Island and elsewhere comes from inside (let's call it "The Process"), and the students' protest intrudes from without. But the second round of mass March in May protests over the weekend, and the education protests slated for tomorrow, show that anger is shared far beyond the ranks of campus socialists. Passions such as these are what The Process exists to contain — preferably before they can begin.

We are asked to identify the looping pantomime of parliamentary broadcasts, ritualised interviews, panel shows and truth-free elections with politics as such. Journalists and professional politicians are equally invested in these events, as a way that all of our messy differences can be reconciled. The suggestion that this leaves offcuts and remainders can only be an affront.

The problem is that for more than 30 years, politicians in both major parties have committed to diminishing the stock of what we hold in common. Governments have changed, but all of them have eroded the framework of public institutions, collective ownership and universal services that Australians overwhelmingly and repeatedly say that they would quite like to retain.

On both sides, government is understood as a species of management, and a central task is managing the disappointments that might arise from a quaint belief that democratic government is not our shepherd, but our instrument. One way of doing this is to say that direct action and forthright demands are unreasonable, as Pyne and Bowen did late last week.

In our post-political landscape, many have concluded that the major parties are not actual alternatives. The rise of minor parties — on the left and the right — bears this out. So too do the displays of antagonism — in universities, and in the streets — that otherwise have no outlet. When official politics converges on a non-existent middle, people will find new ways to voice their disagreement. From the Q&A protest, to the March in March, to social media activism, to campus protests, people find ways to express disagreements that The Process cannot accommodate.

Those at the centre of The Process find fault not with those who have led us to this impasse, only with our responses to it. They demand a gentler response – or failing that, a more brutal one. People are criticised either for their apathy or their bad manners.

Few if any commentators publicly anticipated the anger that Joe Hockey’s budget has provoked. When popular anger intensifies, those at the centre of The Process become all the more preoccupied with moderation and civility. The Daily Telegraph delivered yesterday, describing the March in May protests as a revolt of the ferals.

Get ready for tomorrow's university protests to be received in the same way. The response to the Coalition’s attacks on higher education (following the assurances that this would not happen) can only be intensified by the recent memory of Gillard Labor’s defunding of the sector, just a few years after the ALP came to office promising an “education revolution”.

Popular anger speaks with a rough voice, and populism can have ragged, sometimes dangerous edges. But populism can also be a redemptive force. No government can do without democratic legitimacy, and anyone who thinks that this is simply a matter of voting does not understand how the abstractions of policy interact with the visceral register of political passions and lived experience. Democracy without affective commitments is empty procedure, and purely managerial or technocratic government just worsens our manifest crisis of democratic faith.

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